📚 Save Big on Books! Enjoy 10% off when you spend £100 and 20% off when you spend £200 (or the equivalent in supported currencies)—discount automatically applied when you add books to your cart before checkout! 🛒

Copyright

Ruth Finnegan;

Published On

2025-05-28

Page Range

pp. 113–170

Language

  • English

Print Length

58 pages

4. Style and performance

  • Ruth Finnegan (author)
Chapter of: Oral Poetry(pp. 113–170)
This chapter explores the intricate interplay between style and performance in oral poetry, emphasizing that both aspects are inseparable and essential for a complete understanding of this art form. While literary scholars have traditionally focused on style and sociologists on performance, this chapter argues that neither can be fully appreciated without considering the other. The study of style involves the recognition of social conventions that shape artistic expression, highlighting the constraints and freedoms oral poets face within these conventions. Style encompasses formal structures, verbal techniques, and prosodic systems like metre, alliteration, assonance, and rhythm, which define the oral tradition's distinctiveness.
Performance, in turn, is central to the oral tradition, where the mode of delivery—whether sung, chanted, or spoken—adds layers of meaning and engagement for the audience. The chapter addresses how rhythmic movement, repetition, and audience participation are integral to performance and how they help differentiate oral poetry from written forms. The overlap between style and performance underscores the creative process in oral literature, where poets work within traditional frameworks while often innovating to captivate their audience through both verbal and performative artistry.

Contributors

Ruth Finnegan

(author)
Fellow at British Academy
Honorary Fellow of Somerville College at University of Oxford

Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE was born in 1933 in the beautiful fraught once-island city of Derry, Northern Ireland, and brought up there, together with several magical years during the war in Donegal. She had her education at the little Ballymore First School in County Donegal, Londonderry High School, Mount (Quaker) School York, then first class honours in Classics (Literae humaniores) and a doctorate in Anthropology at Oxford. This was followed by fieldwork and university teaching in Africa, principally Sierra Leone and Nigeria. She then joined the pioneering Open University as a founding member of the academic staff, where she spent the rest of her career apart from three years – and more fieldwork – at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and is now, proudly, an Open University Emeritus Professor. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, and is also an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Ruth has published two books with OBP, Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation (2011), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0012, and Oral Literature in Africa (2012), https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0025.